All bloggers need to know who are reading them and where are they come from. Personally I’m checking my logs between 4 to 6 times a day. It’s a sort of compulsion, it’s a reward. But it’s more than this. It can be a way to discover who is linking to you, who discuss of your blog or posts. These traffic logs are a really interesting and useful to analysis. It can help you to upgrade your blog; to know who your readers are and what they are reading on your blog. You can track their movement through your posts, over time. Now how can you archive this?

Personally I’m using statcounter.com. This is the best, free, web traffic logging service I found. How it work? It’s easy. You sing-up for an account and after you can add many projects to this account. Then, if you have 2 or 3 blogs, you can have one account with one entry for each of them. Statcounter is basically a free system. You have a permanent counter of you page views, unique and returning visitors, with a related graph graduated by days, months or years. With this graph you can see the evolution of your blog, see peaks when you published a popular article, etc. There is the graph of my traffic since the first days of this blog:

With the free service you also have a traffic log of the 100 last visits of your project. It’s the must useful part of the service. With this information, you know the time, the OS and the browser used by your readers. You also know the resolution of their screens, the country they came from and, the most important, the pages they visit and the pages they come from. If you wish, you can pay to upgrade the length of this detailed log. Personally I don’t have the funds to pay for this and, for the moment, the 100 entries free log is enough for me. But if I would get more hits, I would consider the possibility to upgrade my account. What I personally appreciate with this service that other don’t give is the returning visitor counter. With this one, you know how many people, each day, are returning to your blog. There is a snippet of what look like the detailed log:

Many statistics are computed by the system with the detailed log:

With these statistics you can know everything about your readers. The path they took through your blog, the things they read, the time they spend, your popular pages, etc, etc. It’s most then important to know these things. It will give you the knowledge of what your readers are interested in without them saying it to you. Then it gives you hints of what to change on your blog to enhance the experience of your visitors.

There are two other things that I really like with the service. The first one is the possibility to put your IP address on the ban list. Then your visits will not be logged in the system. Is that not beautiful? Yes it is! The second thing is that you can show or hide the counter on your blog. If you wish, it can be totally invisible to your readers. It’s the first free system I saw that give you this opportunity.

Finally this system was not created for blog; it was for general purpose websites. But all his features are perfect to track the traffic post by post. For all his features, his statistics and his price I make him the best blog traffic tracking system I found.

Technoratie: [blog] [profiling] [analysis] [traffic] [statcounter]